From Vehicular Networks to IoT for Smart Roads: How a Communication Engineer Can Help Solve Transportation Problems (Invited Talk)

Intelligent transportation system (ITS) is an important development that applies advanced sensing, communication, big data analysis and control technologies to ground transportation in order to improve safety, mobility and efficiency. This talk will begin with a brief introduction to our work in vehicular networks, which started more than ten years ago. As we delve deeper into vehicular networks and interact more frequently with transportation stakeholders, we realize that ITS is a truly cross-disciplinary area, in order for vehicular networks to achieve its desired impact, we need to think beyond the traditional communication domain, and start to ponder the deeper-level questions of what fundamental changes can be brought by advanced sensing and communication techniques to transportation and how the applications of advanced sensing and communication techniques can help solve crucial transportation problems. To this end, we will introduce our more recent work of developing advanced IoT technology to transform our roads into smart roads, which in the shorter term, make our roads safer and more efficient while providing the fine-grained real-time traffic information for traffic management; in the longer term, provide the much-needed road infrastructure support for the future booming CAV revolution

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

iTETRIS: An Integrated Wireless and Traffic Platform for Real-Time Road Traffic Management Solutions

Wireless vehicular cooperative systems have been identified as an attractive solution to improve road traffic management, thereby contributing to the European goal of safer, cleaner, and more efficient and sustainable traffic solutions. V2V-V2I communication technologies can improve traffic management through real-time exchange of data among vehicles and with road infrastructure. It is also of great importance to investigate the adequate combination of V2V and V2I technologies to ensure the continuous and costefficient operation of traffic management solutions based on wireless vehicular cooperative solutions. However, to adequately design and optimize these communication protocols and analyze the potential of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve road traffic management, adequate testbeds and field operational tests need to be conducted. Despite the potential of Field Operational Tests to get the first insights into the benefits and problems faced in the development of wireless vehicular cooperative systems, there is yet the need to evaluate in the long term and large dimension the true potential benefits of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve traffic efficiency. To this aim, iTETRIS is devoted to the development of advanced tools coupling traffic and wireless communication simulators